A learner is like an iCloud

      A learner is an iCloud. But what is iCloud? ICloud is firstly used, as far as I know, in apple products such as iphone, ipad, ipod and macbook. As a courtesy for users to share any information such as photos, apps, digital notepad, music within all their apple products without the inconvenience of inputting everything to separate products again and again, iCloud has the function to store all the information in the user's personal digital cloud. If users open the cloud, they will find that a picture taken by their iphones shows up in their macbook and ipad. And it is the same route for other information I mentioned above.

      According to George Siemens wrote in A Learning Theory of the Digital Age: Half of what is known today was not known 10 years ago. The amount of knowledge in the world has doubled in the past 10 years and is doubling every 18 months.Informal learning is a significant aspect of our learning experience. Formal education no longer comprises the majority of our learning. Faced to such a huge amount of updated information, learners definitely will learn to select and classify information and try to store what they consider is  useful or interesting. Learners' brain are more likely colorful clouds floating around upon the information era. These clouds can have different shapes and different size. What in common is that they stand for the outcome of individual's occupied information. Or to be more accurate, iCloud is not only a form of outcome but also the process of cognizing and constructing information.

      But iCould is not a static object. The amazing place of iCloud is that it construct a networld for your abiotic digital products. In terms of iCloud, they can share information just like people do. And in such an information era, sharing information is of great significant just like The Network is Learning. However, only focusing on sharing will lead to chaos. The difference between apple's iCloud and learns' iCloud is that human beings have the ability of self-organization. Like George Siemens quoted in A Learning Theory of the Digital Age: self-organization is the spontaneous formation of well organized structures, patterns, or behaviors, from random initial conditions. He also mentioned that self-organization on a personal level is a micro-process of the larger self-organizing knowledge constructs created within corporate or institutional environments. Thus, learners' iCould is intelligent.